"Newborns can recognize the voices they’ve been hearing for the last trimester in the womb, especially the sounds that come from their mothers, and prefer those voices to the voices of strangers. They also prefer other languages with similar rhythms, rather than languages with very different rhythms," Anne Cutler, a psycholinguist and professor from Australia, told the paper.

The study, published in the Royal Society Open Science journal earlier this year, looked at Dutch-speaking children adopted from Korea.

Researchers found these people and toddlers adopted by Dutch-speaking families had the ability to make Korean "sounds."

"The language heard before birth and in the first months of life had affected both sound perception and sound production, even though the change of language environment happened before the children started making those sounds themselves," The New York Times notes.

And there are plenty of benefits of allowing a child to pick up another language.